Restructuring & Corporate Performance

A new basis for restructuring your business

Most companies treat restructuring as a reactive solution to a crisis, but there’s more to it. Change can be initiated proactively.

Restructuring has undergone significant changes over the last few decades. At first, the focus was on restructuring the balance sheet and on getting the financial basis right. This was followed by a period driven by cost cutting. Nowadays, restructuring takes a holistic approach that starts with a sustainable business model from which cost structures, organization, and adequate financing are derived. Mainly due to changing financing environments, complex coordination issues, and dramatically rising numbers of involved parties, corporate transformation can no longer be thought of as a special tool that’s only brandished once the wheels start falling off—it is an ongoing process that can deliver enormous benefits to your company.

"What does a business need to be prepared for when it faces restructuring?"

We are the market leader in German speaking countries and hold a strong international position. We guide companies through a goal-orientated process that helps them systematically rebuild their business systems, and we can show you how to intelligently connect restructuring with innovation, cost optimization, and growth. The aim of transforming a company is not simply to keep afloat with adapted cost structures, but to create an efficient, agile, and sustainable basis for your future business.

When we look at restructuring case portfolios, we identify them as one of two major groups. On one hand there are the classic restructuring cases. These are usually in a severe earnings or liquidity crisis, often driven by various stakeholders including the financing parties. On the other hand there are cases that have just reached—or are about to reach—an earnings crisis. These we consider as Corporate Performance cases.

While the underlying analysis and tools are very much alike, the way to initiate change is fundamentally different. In a crisis, we deliver speedy first aid and help to lay a new foundation for structural measures. Here, the need for change is usually widely understood. In a Corporate Performance situation, however, this urgency needs to be argued for and professional change management plays an even more important role. Specific tools apply in each case, with Transformation and Leadership always needed to support the necessary change

In our view, it takes an entrepreneurial perspective to properly restructure a company. That’s why we call our state-of-the-art approach Entrepreneurial Restructuring. It means quickly crafting tailor-made business models to support sustainable success for our clients, and combining strategic, operational and financial tasks. Starting with a convincing business model, we help to identify the "healthy core" of a company. This may mean that parts of the business are no longer deemed sustainable and other solutions must be found—for example, partial sales or partial closures.

We take a different approach to key performance indicators. Moreover, we employ senior teams with sound experience. Our clients can rely on our project base of more than 2,000 cases and a team that consists of restructuring and industry specialists, who cover strategic, operational and financial aspects. Th is is our USP, worldwide. We support our clients throughout the entire implementation, and you can even appoint one of our team to act as the chief restructuring officer within your company.

Many companies are in the best of economic health. Yet even among these players, top executives seem increasingly uncertain about what to do in the face of geopolitical uncertainty and the changing dynamics of digitization. After all, you don't pare back a flourishing branch unless you really have to. We have developed a method that we call Smart Efficiency precisely for this situation.

We see the concept of "smart" as having two main components: acting with strategic vision, and combining efficiency with elasticity. We apply the logic of Smart Efficiency only to companies that are in good shape. This gives management plenty of room to maneuver—room that they should exploit boldly. We believe that concentrating on efficiency alone is too short-sighted, therefore we introduced elasticity as a new parameter for modeling flexible and agile companies, and we look at cost structure flexibilization in order to brace companies for unexpected blows. This agility results in team mobilization, with change management playing an ever increasing role. Taken together, this means that Smart Efficiency simultaneously improves the profitability and adaptability of our clients' core business—in both the short and medium term.

Change can no longer be enacted from the top—there is simply no time to debate during a storm. On the other hand, it’s obvious that transformation will fail unless everyone believes in it and is on board. From management to the employees, you need all hands on deck to realize change in the midst of disruption.

With a dedicated group of specialists and ample experience, we can help you motivate and mobilize your team. We participate in a constant exchange with relevant academic circles, putting your company at the center of the latest theoretical and practical know-how. Our comprehensive advisory services relate to all aspects concerning corporate organization, HR management, corporate transformation, and overhead efficiency. Corporate headquarters, for example, need leadership advantages to justify their costs. They are expected to add value to the company as a whole, acting as a business partner to the operating entities while still maintaining their traditional roles. Managing complexity, innovation, and talent are often where they fall short of their new expectations, but those are also the most pivotal areas for their future.

Our individualized benchmarking is designed to guide companies into highly efficient yet elastic organizational structures. We've identified six specific areas where corporate headquarters can shine in a new role, and we’ve already worked with more than 400 clients to bring these value-adding principles into action—transforming today's headquarters into tomorrow’s ahead-quarters.